


tigers in the moonlight running

by piggy09



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-11
Updated: 2015-02-11
Packaged: 2018-03-11 22:28:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3335084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She wakes up on an unfamiliar bed, in a room whose single window is covered by a cheap curtain. In the corner, Helena is sitting and polishing a sniper rifle, pieces discarded carelessly at her feet.</p><p>Or:<br/>Helena and Rachel start some fires.</p><p>Or:<br/>A story about broken pieces.</p><p>Or:<br/>A story told in broken pieces.</p>
            </blockquote>





	tigers in the moonlight running

**Author's Note:**

> [warnings: blood, gore, references to torture, consent issues relating to Rachel Duncan, incest overtones by way of Helena, arson]

i. 

She wakes up on an unfamiliar bed, in a room whose single window is covered by a cheap curtain. In the corner, Helena is sitting and polishing a sniper rifle, pieces discarded carelessly at her feet.

Helena looks up. “Hello,” she says.

xiii.

Rachel’s hands smell like gasoline and behind her Helena is laughing, the sound like the heartbeat that is pulsing jagged through Rachel’s chest, the sound like the crackling of the building burning down.

Somewhere, glass shatters.

vi.

There’s a sound like a soft sigh as the last piece of Helena’s hair falls to the floor.

“Do I look pretty,” she says, voice rusty and bitter and amused, like the sound of Rachel left out in the rain.

In Rachel’s hands, the scissor blades gleam; the floor is covered with a tarp and then covered again with hair in varying shades of blonde. Rachel’s head prickles in the cold. She can see herself in the mirror; she looks incongruously like a shorn sheep, has never felt more ownership of her name.

“No,” she says. _Snick_ , say the scissors as she closes them.

“Good,” Helena says. “You can be pretty for both of us.”

The image of Helena looking at her, angry and sad, settles in the pit of Rachel’s mind in a way moments do, when they are aching to become memories. She’ll pull out this image later, when they are perched in a hotel bathroom – Rachel on the edge of a chair with her legs neatly folded, Helena crouched like a gargoyle on the toilet seat.

She’s shaking. This is because Rachel is doing her lipstick, a cheap garish drugstore red. It makes her skin look pale, and nothing at all like Rachel’s. This is a relief.

“Hold still,” Rachel says, words like scissor blades as she wraps the hand not holding the lipstick tube around Helena’s chin, around her throat. There is a sort of comfort at the feeling of her own skin under her hand. Her pulse beating away like a frightened animal’s between her fingers. Her own fear, outside of her. Above her hand Helena squirms, the whites of her eyes showing; Rachel tightens her grip, because the sight of her face afraid is more than she can stand.

“Would you like my assistance or _not_ ,” she hisses, and Helena stills herself, tremors rattling through her in intervals like an earthquake on a leash. She finishes the lipstick, stares. Helena looks a mess, pink around the eyes and red around the mouth. Rachel, who’d curled her own eyelashes earlier, feels vindictive.

“Do I look pretty,” Helena says, her eyes like open wounds.

“Yes,” Rachel says. She smiles, tight-lipped; she can feel her lipstick, smooth and perfect on her lips.

iii.

Rachel transfers funds on a startlingly out-of-date PC to the accompaniment of Helena’s whistling and the low angry moaning of the computer fan. _One, two, skip a few,_ she thinks incongruously as frankly absurd amounts of money whisk their way back and forth the Pacific. It’s not enough to stop someone who is _really_ looking for her, but she is not sure anyone will be. Looking for her.

The thought is too large, so she ignores it.

When she walks to the bank, heels tapping crisply on the concrete, she admires herself in the exterior of the building; her neat hair, suit, pristine lipstick. The metal of her gaze. Here is Helena thinking they are the same – but Rachel knows that she is better. This has always been true. This will always be true.

She fixes a smile on her face, and opens the door.

ix.

After a surprisingly lucrative visit to a senator’s house, Helena counts cash while Rachel orders room service. Her legs itch in the jeans she’s wearing, but she has nothing to change into anymore: her clothes are gone. Everything in her apartment is gone. New clothes are an unnecessary luxury, the way good food usually is – but Helena bribed a homeless man to pawn the senator’s watch, and Rachel bartered with a different man at a different pawn shop to earn more than twice as much as she _should_ have for his wife’s cheap fake jewelry. So they’ve earned it.

When the food comes, Helena sits crossed-legged and rips at the food with her paws, shoveling it into her mouth. Rachel cuts her food into small pieces with knife and fork, like a person would; the knife feels uncomfortably familiar in her hand. The body learns.

Helena makes a few disgusting sounds with her mouth full, and when Rachel shoots her an irritated look she swallows an obscenely large lump of food and says, “This is not a nice restaurant, you do not have to cut each piece into little tiny bites.”

“I’d like my food to fit in my mouth,” Rachel says, smiling tightly and continuing to cut away. Helena blows a raspberry, and something in Rachel says _fine, then_ – she picks up her steak with both hands and takes a slow, deliberate bite. The flesh parts between her teeth. Rivulets of what might have been blood trickle down the meat, along the lengths of her hands, heartline lifeline.

She chews, swallows. Something in her is satisfied.

xii.

When Rachel enters the hotel room, after enough time has passed that her repeated face won’t be noticed, she’s met with the sight of Helena asleep on one of the beds. She’s twitching like a dog and making small heartbroken sounds; for a second, Rachel thinks about _one more story Mummy please not tonight Rachel dear_ the way she’d felt, when Kira had woken up. She can almost remember the feeling of it. This echoes that, the one terrifying second where she feels the urge to pull the blanket over Helena’s chest. It is like looking over the edge of a cliff, into the drop.

She closes the door, maybe louder than she might have. On the bed Helena gasps “ _sestra_ ” and wakes. Or maybe she doesn’t. Rachel’s back was turned, double-checking the lock on the door, and she didn’t hear anything. She didn’t hear a thing.

xv.

“It’s alright. I am here. Shh, shh, shh.”

xi.

Rachel’s passcode still works in the pharmaceutical company’s keypad, which is disconcerting. She’d have thought word would have spread this far – then again, they always did have a tendency to underestimate her. Behind her Helena twirls the umbrella she’s holding, cocked at an angle to block the security cameras. She whistles a few bars of a symphony, the velvet sound of violins gone harsh and screeching between her lips. Discordant.

“I will lock you out and finish this myself,” Rachel says, hands in neat gloves wrapped around the handle of the door. In the pocket of her jacket her knife aches, her knife sings. Rachel still finds herself used to a voiceless world; it is _loud_ , violence, loud in a way she wasn’t expecting.

“You need me,” Helena croons in a sing-song, walks jauntily into the building. Rachel ducks under the umbrella, follows; when they’re inside, Helena’s hand wraps around Rachel’s, sticky like a child’s.

 _I don’t_ , Rachel wants to say. _I don’t need you at all_.

ii.

(Helena needs Rachel for money and passwords, a spidermind to understand spiderwebs; Rachel needs Helena for the act of plunging a knife into a chest, over and over and over again.

Helena needs a hand on her leash.

Rachel needs a leash to hold, needs _control._ )

viii.

The blade pierces the guard’s windpipe and he dies messily, gurgling on his own blood and twitching like a fish on the floor until he finally dies. There’s a fine mist of blood on Rachel’s skin. She should probably be feeling something.

Mostly, she’s annoyed: there wasn’t supposed to be anyone in this section of the building, which is why Rachel is here on her own. It’s a matter of destroying the fragile collection of vials in one of the basement labs and then leaving, the soles of her shoes glittering with broken glass. This necessitates a change in plan, and possibly a clean-up. Despite herself she misses the days when she could make a phone call and have this mess taken care of.

Rachel opens the man’s suit with steady gloved fingers, cleans the knife blade on the inside of his shirt. Puts the knife back in the pocket of her bag. Reaches into another pocket, removes the burner phone, fires off a quick text and moves deeper into the lab.

She slides a stolen keycard through the door and listens to the beep – stares straight into the green light, one machine acknowledging another. It leaves afterspots on her vision as she steps through the room. Her steps, after all this time, are still unfamiliar to her without the reassuring echo-click of heels, the reminder that she continues to exist. Sometimes she thinks she is starting to erode, like a cliff facing the sea. As she destroys the people who made her, so too does she destroy herself – _I am become Death, destroyer of worlds_. She used to think that quote belonged to her father. But, like many things, she has stolen it and reclaimed it as her own.

She is something like Prometheus. Think of fires.

The vials are in a cabinet in the back of the room, and Rachel eyes her own reflection in the glass of the door as she opens it. _Shh_ , it hums, and she watches her face wrinkle and distort with the sliding of the door. She wraps her hand around a vial.

In one sharp motion, she throws it across the room. Good. _Good_ , more work destroyed, years and years of effort, one creation destroying another, _good_ , she hurls another vial to the ground and it shatters like the bone marrow beneath her heel like the world beneath her heel _good_.

There’s a howl building in her throat as she shatters vial after vial, liquid seeping out across the floor. All that broken glass, and Rachel across the room from it, always separate from the broken things.

A noise is choking her throat, but she is out of things to break. She closes her eyes, feels the brush of eyelashes against her cheek, swallows the anger down. Down. Down. Down. Slowly she regains control. Slowly she remembers what it is to feel cold.

Her eyes blink open. What a mess. Someone will be down soon to clean it up, she supposes.

Helena had thrown her a juicebox before they’d moved into the building. Apple juice. It’s the only kind she’s willing to purchase, and Rachel never asks why. She rummages through the bag until she finds the box, slightly dented, removes the plastic straw, punctures the hole in the top.

Without ceremony she crosses the room and squirts the juicebox’s contents into the priceless liquid seeping into the floor. When she’s done, the room looks like it’s covered in piss and smells like autumn. The death of things. Rachel puts the empty juicebox in her bag and leaves the room.

When she returns to what she refuses to think is the _scene of the crime_ , Helena is sitting on a desk, feet swinging. The body is gone. The room stinks of bleach, and slightly like apples.

“You killed him,” Helena says delightedly. “Did you _like_ it?”

“Did you,” Rachel snaps. Helena’s head rolls side to side on her neck as she considers. Her feet swing back and forth, twin pendulums.

“They were bad,” she says finally. “They were doing wrong. All of them are sinners.”

This is patently untrue: Rachel knows the man she just killed knew less than one percent of what was going on in this facility, likely had children and a wife and no idea what was in the room he was guarding. But to destroy Helena’s twisted morality would be to render her ineffective as a weapon, and the time hasn’t come for that yet.

Rachel closes her eyes, reduces this moment to a list of bullet points and files it away. She finds this easier to do than attempting to preserve the emotion of a scene.

Trying to remember the _feeling_ has never worked for her.

But this might come in handy, someday, when Helena’s outlived her usefulness. For now she watches Helena beam at her and flip her hood over her head in a clumsy gesture. Then she’s closed the distance between them and slung her arm over Rachel’s shoulder, awkward and sloppy, tugging Rachel towards the exit. The way out. There’s a map in Rachel’s mind lit in Christmas colors _let Mummy open her presents first oh come on Ethan look at how excited she—_ reds and greens—and Rachel traces the green route in her mind, too distracted to shake Helena’s arm from her shoulder. She’s prepared at any point to steer Helena the right way, but although Helena looks to choose her way based on sheer capriciousness she never leaves the safest path.

Their departure lacks ceremony: one moment they are criminals, the next nothing but twins parting ways in a crowd outside a glass laboratory. Helena’s drawn the short straw, has to take the long way back to their latest room. She could be hours – Rachel doesn’t trust her not to stop at a bakery or five.

Rachel walks through the city, looks at her reflection in the glass of every building she passes. She looks, she reassures herself, exactly the same.

v.

Helena tries to hug her, once.

vii.

“You could come home,” Helena says out of nowhere, interrupting a silent drive in a stolen car from one sleeping city to another. Helena is driving, fingers drumming at the wheel, and Rachel is learning what it is to ride in the passenger seat and not the back. The sound of Helena’s voice is jarring, like kissing a man with three days’ worth of stubble.

(Rachel used to make them shave. That was a long time ago.)

“After this,” Helena continues, like Rachel’s given any indication like she cares, “you could come home. Be a part of our family.”

“Sarah would forgive you,” she finishes, soft. Rachel’s sure she means it to be touching, but the thought of approaching Sarah Manning with her tail tucked between her legs, begging for forgiveness, is enough to rip a laugh from her throat. It sounds more like a yelp, painful and panicked.

“You are telling that to _yourself_ ,” Rachel hisses at her reflection in the window. “ _You_ would like your sister to forgive you. _You_ find the thought comforting. We are not the same. I have no sisters, and I need none of you to _forgive_ me.”

 _You’re wasting your potential_ , she wants to scream. _Stop doing this for other people, stop aiming for something as low as_ acceptance _. You are better than that._

But that wouldn’t be directed at Helena at all, would it. Not the woman breathing in hasty gulps next to Rachel in the car, who killed a man just so she could paint a family on Rachel’s walls. Helena is not worth the effort of bettering.

(This may or may not be a lie.)

(What is a lie is those earlier words being the ones she wants to scream the most. No, the ones choking her throat are these: _there is no “after this.”_ )

xvi.

Rachel’s drawn the short straw and tucks her hands in her pockets, keeps her hood up and her face down and walks to a gas station. She only takes the hood down after she’s locked herself in the bathroom. She looks at herself in the mirror.

There is blood _everywhere_. Slowly Rachel takes off the hooded sweatshirt she’s wearing – she’s still not used to the fabric on her skin – and looks at herself, painted crimson.

She starts crying suddenly and without explanation, one sob and then another clawing their way from her throat. Then she is on the floor of the bathroom, knees pressed to her chest, curled in on herself. Her mind is spitting metaphors at her: like a child, like a fetus in the womb, like something small and weak and she can’t stop thinking about it. The first man she killed hadn’t affected her at all, and she’d thought she was safe from such trivial things as _feelings_. But here she is, falling apart.

Rachel feels, oddly, detached: it isn’t really _her_ crying on a disgusting bathroom floor, because her throat can’t make those sounds. It’s probably Helena again. Look at her, smoothing her hands all up and down her body. What a masturbatory gesture of self-comfort. Nobody lays hands on _Rachel_ , so that can’t be Rachel. That can’t be Rachel. That can’t be Rachel. That can’t be Rachel. That can’t be Rachel. That can’t be Rachel. That can’t be Rachel. That can’t be Rachel. That can’t be

iv.

“A knife,” Rachel says, “ _really_.”

Helena shrugs; her tongue lolls out of her mouth, slightly. In one hand she is holding a knife of her own, smoothing her thumb up and down the smooth unmarked hilt of it. In her other hand she is holding the knife’s twin, offering it to Rachel.

“Could be useful,” Helena says idly. “Easier than a gun, yes? Like cutting steak.” She moves the knife in her left hand in a sawing motion, with helpful sound effects. For a while the knife is still and she makes eye contact with Rachel. From her mouth: the sound of large amounts of liquid gushing.

Rachel reaches out, and wraps her hand around the knife. She pulls it from Helena’s hand. Their hands look strange next to each other, Rachel’s still-immaculate nail polish, Helena’s calluses. They, unlike the knives, are not equal.

The knife is strange in Rachel’s hand; she was always of the belief that the pen was mightier, unless the sword was in someone else’s hand.

It feels strange for less time than she would think, and after a while it becomes something of a comfort. Rachel-with-knife is different than Rachel-, who is nothing, who has nothing, who is nothing except when she is Rachel-with-knife. Rachel-with-knife can make other people hurt more than she has ever hurt. Rachel-with-knife can get information _much_ more quickly than she ever could with her batting eyelashes, her veiled threats. Once she carves open a man’s face into a Glasgow smile because he isn’t talking quickly enough, watches him howl and thinks: _do you remember when you told me to smile more? do you remember when you told me men would like me more?_

She remembers. Anger is a feeling she can hold onto; so, she’s finding more and more, is bloodthirstiness. In the shower afterwards, in her bed at night, she will remember how it felt to have a blade be a logical extension of her self. The memories are so much clearer than the faded tapes of her childhood, the gleaming unreality of her previous life.

After a longer while than that, she starts to crave the knife in her hand.

xiv.

They find files in an old basement of an abandoned facility, and part of Rachel is still furious at all the wasted potential. These should have been copied digitally, made available – no. No. That isn’t—

She bites on her tongue, once, hard; this is a moment of weakness, and pain is a crutch. Disgusting. Regrettable. But she is calm again, and these files are not her problem.

She does look at hers, though, her gaze cool and clear from a printed photograph. Abruptly Rachel thinks with a blade-sharp sting of fear that this isn’t her at all – or maybe _she_ is not her, because the Rachel on the page seems certain. The phrase _my name is Rachel Duncan_ curls on her tongue, but to do it in front of this printed facsimile seems laughably pitiable. Nauseating.

She closes the file with a crisp snap, looks to see if Helena is finished with the gasoline. She is not. Instead she is standing in with her hunched back turned to Rachel, holding a file. Her shoulders are shaking – oh, god, she’s _crying_.

Rachel has to do everything herself. With a sigh through her nose she picks up the can of gasoline from where Helena has abandoned it, begins to douse the room. The smell makes her dizzy. She wants the room to burn, wants to stop feeling the phantom weight of hair _curling down her shoulders in six out of eleven tapes in braids for three out of eleven tapes and_ cutting down sharp as a razor blade around her ears. She doesn’t have _time_ for this strange lurch of emotion, would like it charred to ash.

“Helena,” Rachel snaps, “if you don’t move you are going to be burned.”

Helena looks up in a motion like the break of a bone, eyes wide. She crumples the file in her fists protectively but shuffles to the edge of the room.

“Did you pour all of the gasoline,” she murmurs dazedly, splitting the last word into three distinct ones – gas-o-line.

“I do in fact have the intellect of a grown adult,” Rachel bites, plucking a matchbook out of her pocket with hands that are – hands that are – hands that are –

“I was supposed to be you,” Helena breathes. Her fingers are tracing back and forth over the file,

– shaking. “But then Sarah and I split in two.”

The room smells like gasoline, Rachel cannot get the match to light, and Helena is shaking and babbling about fetuses; in one sharp movement Rachel has dropped the matchbook and slammed Helena against the wall. Her hand is wrapped around Helena’s throat, and Rachel hates her unpainted nails, hates her unadorned wrists. Hates Helena.

“You could _never_ have been me,” she hisses, “and Sarah is not here. That means there is no one who wants to hear your story, do you understand?”

“I am going to let you go,” she continues, slowly, “and you are going to help me burn this building down. We are not going to speak about this. Do I make myself _clear_.”

Helena’s shaking; she nods, anger twitching its way across her face. Rachel lets her go. Picks up the matchbook. Lights a match with hands that are no longer shaking.

They leave the basement in silence, Helena folding a photograph into smaller and smaller pieces and tucking it into her pocket. Rachel watches the image as Helena folds it, two intertwined fetuses folding into each other again and again until they are gone.

x.

People think they are twin sisters constantly, which is why they enter and leave places separately, order room service – twins are more recognizable than one woman with dead eyes and brown hair almost long enough to touch her shoulders. When they do have to go somewhere together it is a constant and screaming source of irritation:

Helena is not Rachel’s sister.

Rachel is not Helena’s sister.

But Helena has woken Rachel up again screaming _sestra, sestra, opustyty pistolet,_ and with her brain raw and scraped and still leaning into sleep Rachel imagines it: having a sister.

Or, she tries. But the thought makes her sick: wanting someone, needing someone. She doesn’t know how to do it. The idea of someone curled around her, fetal, just repulses her. How do you relearn what it is to want someone? How do you come to terms with the idea of _family?_

She can’t sleep, so she sits up; the better to look out the glass window that takes up part of their room. Outside cars stream by, sending patterns of headlights across the walls. The room lights and fades again, bright and dark, like a heartbeat.

“Nightmares,” Helena asks from the other bed, a loud sound in the quiet. It’s jarring, and Rachel’s eyelids are heavy, and she is frustrated by this one thing she cannot quite grasp.

“What is it like to have a sister,” she asks instead, regretting the words the second they’re out of her mouth; if the worst comes, she’ll deny having said them, say Helena was hallucinating, blame it on Helena’s nightmares waking her up. There are always ways to hurt other people instead of yourself.

The room is silent for a second, and between one flash of headlights and the next Helena is in Rachel’s bed, perched solemnly on the edge. Her legs are long and bare beneath the oversized shirt she’s wearing as pajamas. They are picked clean, like old bones.

“Do you ever feel empty,” Helena whispers, “here,” and puts her palm flat over the space across from Rachel’s heart, the flat skin between her neck and breast.

 _I feel empty everywhere_ , Rachel thinks, with something close to pride, but swallows that down and says, “No.”

“Yes you do,” Helena says, “or you would not ask.” Her fingers curl and uncurl, scraping lines across Rachel’s skin. “Having a sister…hm. Is like having that part of you taken out, and put in someone else.”

“So you are always hungry,” she whispers, “always you want to be with them.” She’s seemingly mesmerized by the spread of her own hand, and Rachel picks it up, removes it. For a second her hand covers Helena’s hand, their fingers fitting perfectly together, but before Rachel can think about it too much she lets go.

Helena looks at her from across the space between them. In the spaces between light and dark her face vanishes and reappears again and again, like looking in a broken mirror.

xvii.

The last head of the hydra falls when Rachel’s knife plunges into the eyeball of a woman in a sharp dress. She falls to the floor in a clatter of jewelry and heels, and Rachel thinks: isn’t that stupid, how would you run in heels, what is the point of jewelry anyways.

She looks very strange down there on the floor, with a sharp object sticking out of her left eye socket. Rachel watches the nameless, faceless woman twitch on the floor, distantly, idly wishes she had more knives and more places to put them. A while ago, she thinks, she didn’t want to use the knives. A while ago her hair was blonde.

It is strange, the people we become.

i.

Helena explains, eyes steady on Rachel’s face, and Rachel dreams of a world where she is violent enough to punch Helena in the stomach.

“Helena,” she says instead, soothingly, swallowing down the bitter taste of anger and horror and other sharp-tasting things, “let me go. Someone will come looking for me soon.”

Helena glares at her, like a child. “I thought you would want to,” she says. “You are not angry, _yahnya?_ They took you apart and put you back together. Like me.” She picks up a piece of her rifle, fidgets with it; she belongs in the scattered constellation of rifle parts, Rachel thinks. The two of them are broken weapons.

Rachel is _not_.

(But she is angry. This will be enough.)

**Author's Note:**

> And we all know how to fake it baby  
> And all we know is gone  
> We must be killers  
> Children of the wild ones  
> Killers  
> Where we got left to run?  
> Killer, killer, killer killer  
> Killer, killer, killer, killer  
> ~"We Must Be Killers," Mikky Ekko
> 
> Please leave kudos + comments if you liked! Thanks!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [howling "do you believe?" (of the wild ones remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3409073) by [piggy09](https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09)




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